Ruby.. BOO! CLR LISP JavaSchools.. and a total lack of focus

I finished the Ruby book I was reading online, but unfortunately, it ended before the continuations, so it looks like I will need to find another resource to finish up. I suppose I could start writing a program, but I would rather keep digging. If anyone has a good recommendation for an advanced Ruby resource (and by advanced I mean high end features, not written in gibberish), send it on.

So instead of following up on Ruby, I instead started looking at Boo. Someone suggested it and I have to admit, I am impressed. I do not care for some of the syntax, but I really like the type inference system, which goes a bit farther than var in C# 3.0. I do however wonder if making inference the default, instead of explicit through var is the right thing to do, but I’m not really sure one way or the other yet.

As far as syntax goes, one thing I do not understand is def. Why is that there? However, ignoring some oddities like this, it is a beautiful achievement. Beyond the language itself, the site is really interesting because of how well it demonstrates the not well know cross platform capabilities of .NET. See.

I knew about Mono before, but I had never heard of GTK# before. Boo has an Eclipse plug-in as well. Oddly, there is no VS.NET plug-in for boo. The whole project is an interesting mash-up of many different technologies that people generally assume do not fit together.

Boo also has some cool language features.

On a related note, I also read a set of articles that I found interesting. Sriram seems to be in the same mode as I am, trying to soak up the juice from languages like LISP. I would totally agree that I have failed to fall in love with LISP, or even Ruby. There are some cool things there, but I am driven away by others. LISP is far worse in this way. Despite that, I am still very happy that I spent the time on it. I may never write a single line of LISP code, but that was not the point was it?

Sriram, pointed to an article on teaching Computer Science. While Joel may be right that his tried and true tests do not work as well on someone who has not studied LISP or something similar, I wonder if he is not making the same mistake he criticizes others for. That is that he is using “grep” to evaluate resumes. He is looking for LISP experience however instead of Java experience. What he should really be looking for is a way to test his candidates that does not rely upon prior knowledge that is unrelated to the job.

Joel compares the ability of developers to grapple with recursion and pointers with the ability to create architecture, because they require a similar skill of breaking down problems to properly solve. However, why not use a test that only requires that skill, but only requires commonplace knowledge. Even better might be to actually test their ability to create architecture, but I suppose Joel feels that either this would take too long, or that he does not expect his candidates to come to the job with that knowledge.

However, if what you are looking for is problem solving skills and architecture knowledge, why look for LISP knowledge, or pointer knowledge, etc. which may never come up for the average developer?